Intolerable abuses had invaded the collation to benefices. The revenues which had been provided by the piety of the past for the maintenance of public worship, for the subsistence of the ministers of religion, and for the support of the poor, had accumulated in the hands of a few abbés about the Court and high dignitaries of the Church. M. de Marbeuf, archbishop of Lyons, was Abbot commendatory of Bec, the nursery of S. Anselm and Lanfranc; the celebrated Abbé Maury held in commendam the Abbey of Lyons-la-Forêt; Dom Guillaume-Louis Laforcade, a Benedictine resident at S. Denis, was Prior of Acquigny; De Raze, minister of the Prince-bishop of Bâle, was Prior of Saint-Lô, near Bourg-Achard; Loménie de Brienne, archbishop of Sens, who was minister of finance in 1788, and of whom M. Thiers well says, that ‘if he did not make the fortune of France, he certainly made his own,’ possessed 678,000 livres per annum, drawn from benefices all over France, and his brother, the Archbishop of Trajanopolis was non-resident Abbot of the wealthy Abbey of Jumiéges. This state of things drew from the redactors of the _cahiers_ of the third estate many bitter recriminations. ‘It is revolting,’ said Villiers-en-Vexin, ‘that the goods of the Church should only go to nourish the passions of titulars.’ ‘According to the canons,’ said the parish of Thilliers, ‘every beneficed clergyman is bound to give a quarter of his income to the poor. In our parish, with a revenue of twelve thousand livres flowing into the Church, nothing returns to the poor but the scanty alms of the ill-paid curate.’ ‘Is it not surprising,’ said the people of Plessis-Hébert, ‘to see so many bishops and abbés squander their revenues in Paris, instead of expending them on religious works, in those places whence they are derived?’ Fontenay wrote in stronger terms: ‘The most revolting abuse is the miserable exspoliation of the commendatory abbeys. The people are indignant at it. They see the fruit of their toil pass into the covetous hands of a titular, deaf to the cries of misery, whose ears are filled with the clatter of political affairs and the rattle of pleasure. Let the king seize on the property of the Church and pay with it the debts of the State--this is what the country desires! The Church has no need of fiefs to govern souls.’ Whilst the high dignitaries rolled in riches, a large class of priests, and that the most deserving, vegetated in a wretched condition of poverty. These were the curés of parishes, who were deprived of the tithe which passed into the hands of some lay or high clerical impropriator, and who received only a small indemnity, called the _portion congrue_, scarcely sufficient to keep them from perishing with hunger.